Who – or what – caused this financial crisis?
There are lots of candidates for blame over the crisis facing the world’s financial markets: the bankers, the speculators, the regulators, the politicians, or all of us for racking up debt and being so greedy.
But there’s another possible culprit: computer software. Apparently calculating whether to buy or sell shares – and especially derivatives – is too complicated and time-sensitive that humans cannot do it and software based on complicated algorithms has been doing it for us. So it’s the machines that provoked the crisis.
You can read a discussion of this theory here.